After the British established the entrepôt of Victoria City (now Central and Western District on Hong Kong Island), the local population increased substantially, and as a result Tong Lau (Chinese tenement) began to appear. These were three-to-four-storey buildings, tightly packed in city blocks, and combining Chinese and European architectural elements. The ground floor were typically shops, with apartments and small balconies upstairs. These buildings had stairs but no elevators, and sometimes had neither toilet facilities. These Tong Lau remained the mainstay of Hong Kong architecture until at least World War II; a number of these building survive to this day, albeit often in a derelict state.

The first building in Hong Kong to be classified as the first high rise was constructed between June 1904 and December 1905. It consisted of 5 major buildings, each stacking 5 to 6 stories high. The structures were raised by the Hong Kong Land company under Catchick Paul Chater and James Johnstone Keswick.[4]

In the residential sector, multi-story buildings did not appear until the Buildings Ordinance 1955 lifted the height limit of residential buildings. This change was necessitated by the massive influx of refugees into Hong Kong after the Communist revolution in China in 1949, and the subsequent Shek Kip Mei slum fire in 1953. Public housing estates, originally seven-storeys high with notoriously cramped conditions, public bathrooms and no kitchens, were hastily built to accommodate the homeless; meanwhile private apartments, still tightly packed into city blocks like the Tong Lau of old, had grown to over 20 stories high by the mid-1960s.

Until the late 1990s, the primary demand for high-end buildings was in and around Central. The buildings of Central comprise the skyline along the coast of the Victoria Harbour, a famous tourist attraction in Hong Kong. But until Kai Tak Airport closed in 1998, strict height restrictions were in force in Kowloon so that aeroplanes could come in to land. These restrictions have now been lifted and many new skyscrapers in Kowloon have been constructed, including the International Commerce Center at the West Kowloonreclamation, which has been the tallest building in Hong Kong since its completion in 2010.

Many commercial and residential towers built in the past two decades are among the tallest in the world, including Highcliff, The Arch, and The Harbourside. Still, more towers are under construction, like One Island East. At present, Hong Kong has the world's biggest skyline with a total of 7,681 skyscrapers, placing it ahead of even New York City, despite the fact that New York is larger in area.[7] Most of these were built in past two decades.[7]

Hong Kong's best-known building is probably I. M. Pei's Bank of China Tower. The building attracted heated controversy from the moment its design was released to the public, which continued for years after the building's completion in 1990. The building was said to cast negative feng shui energy into the heart of Hong Kong due to the building's sharp angles. One rumour even went so far as to say that the negative energy was concentrated on the Government House as a Chinese plot to foil any decisions taken there. The two white aerials on top on the building were deemed inauspicious as two sticks of incense are burned for the dead.